The Dark Ages…How Dark Were They, Really? – Flashcards
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The period between 600 and 1450 CE is often called
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the Middle Ages in Europe because it came between the Roman Empire — assuming you forget the Byzantines — and the beginning of the Modern Age.
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However, outside of Europe, the Dark Ages were truly an
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Age of Enlightenment
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Medieval Europe had less
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trade, fewer cities, and less cultural output than the original Roman Empire.
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London and Paris were fetid firetraps with none of the planning of
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sewage management of places 5,000 years older like Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley Civilization, let alone Rome.
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But with fewer powerful governments, wars were at least smaller, which is one reason why Europeans living in Medieval Times
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lived slightly longer — life expectancy was 30 — than Europeans during the Roman Empire — when life expectancy was 28.
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Instead of centralized governments, Europe in the middle ages had feudalism, a political system based on
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reciprocal relationships between lords, who owned lots of land, and vassals, who protected the land and got to dress up as knights in exchange for pledging loyalty to the lords.
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The lords were also vassals to more important lords, with the most important of all being the
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king.
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Below the knights were peasants who did the actual work on the land in exchange for
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protection from bandits and other threats.
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Feudalism was also an economic system, with the peasants working the land and keeping some of their production to feed themselves while
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giving the rest to the landowner whose land they worked.
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The small scale, local nature of the feudal system was perfect for a time and place where
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the threats to peoples' safety were also small scale and local.
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in fuedalism there's little freedom and absolutely no
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social mobility. Peasants could never work their way up to lords, and they almost never left their villages.
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things were certainly brighter in the
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Islamic world, or Dar al Islam.
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The Umayyad Dynasty then expanded the empire west to Spain and moved the capital to
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Damascus, because it was closer to the action, empire-wise but still technically in Arabia.
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Staying in Arabia was really important to the Umayyad's because they'd established this hierarchy in the empire with
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Arabs like themselves at the top and in fact they tried to keep Arabs from fraternizing with non-Arab Muslims throughout the Empire.
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This of course annoyed the non-Arab Muslims, because the Quran says that we're all supposed to be equal. And pretty quickly the majority of Muslims weren't Arabs, which made it pretty easy for them to
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overthrow the Umayyad's, which they did in 750 CE.
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After overthrowing the Umayyads, the
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Abbasids took their place
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The Abbasids took over in 750 and no one could fully defeat them — until
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1258, when they were conquered by the Mongols.
